Oysters in France, KFC in Japan... do they know it’s Christmas?

My Jewish grandparents adopted many local traditions when they fled to Britain from Vienna in 1938. They became members of the Women’s Institute and Rotary Club, attended an Anglican church – and they ate a proper Christmas dinner. Christmas Eve is the main event in Austria and the meal centres on fish. But to insist on celebrating this way would have marked them out as different. Even for newly arrived refugees it was immediately obvious what you should eat on Christmas day: roast chicken (then a luxury, and more appropriate for a family of four than a vast turkey), roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts and gravy.

Your choice of Christmas food has long been regarded as a sign of where your affinities lie. Yet even as they dutifully piled their plates with meat and veg, my grandparents were probably missing the baked carp of their homeland. Christmas is a curious blend of the universal and the local. The food served to celebrate it encompasses more variety than a box of chocolates, yet most of us assume that the flavours of our country’s Christmas, the treats and sweetmeats that mark out the day as special, are the flavours of Christmas. Imperial Britain went a step further than that: it tried to persuade the world – or at least the countries of the British Empire – that its traditions were the only acceptable ones. Soggy sprouts as soft power.

The many different iterations of Christmas feasting are all lavish. Mid-winter, when animals are at their plumpest, has long been a time of ritualised gluttony in the northern hemisphere. Christmas feasts in 17th-century England featured every kind of meat, from veal to venison, goose to lark, swan to rabbit.

Christmas menus today offer a revealing insight into what each country has historically considered special. In much of northern Europe, December is a time to consume copious quantities of mulled wine and cookies, fragrant with ginger and cinnamon, anise and cloves. Sugar and spice were once hugely expensive – that, as much as anything, explains their role at Christmas. They were especially pricey in colonial America because it was allowed to trade only with Britain. The gingerbread-spiced lattes touted by American coffee shops at this time of year look even more indulgent in light of such a legacy.

In Denmark, Christmas means risalamande, a rice pudding enriched with almonds. Whereas spiced cookies show off products that were once scarce, the Danish Christmas celebrates the available. During the second world war many basic staples were in short supply across Europe, including rice, but dairy produce was abundant in Denmark (German forces nicknamed it “The Cream Front”). A dish involving copious quantities of whipped cream was an achievable treat for the occupied Danes.

Christmas in Japan, by contrast, is inextricably associated with fried chicken, thanks to a marketing brainwave by the manager of the country’s first KFC in the 1970s. Originally aimed at homesick Americans and Britons, the festive “party barrels” soon took off across the whole country, propelled by the slogan:“Kentucky for Christmas!” Today millions of Japanese celebrate Christmas by scoffing KFC. Advance orders start in November.

The French begin their festive meal after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Known as le réveillon – “the awakening” – it typically involves a generous number of courses including oysters, foie gras and a capon (a castrated cockerel). Aside from a log of bûche de Noël, which rounds off the feast, there is nothing particularly distinctive about most of its dishes – they represent luxuriously good food in abundant quantity. Why would a nation of gourmets limit their best foods to a mere one day a year?

The menu for a Christmas Day dinner in Britain is distinctive from other countries not in the particulars of its flavours but the rigidity of its formula. The bill of fare these days – turkey, stuffing, pudding – is a legacy of the Victorians, particularly Charles Dickens. The enormous turkey that Scrooge sent the Cratchit family at the end of “A Christmas Carol” assured the bird’s long-term dominance over other meats such as goose. The family’s home-made sage-and-onion stuffing has become the default accompaniment to the meat – and is now produced on an industrial scale. Plum pudding, with its flaming brandy cap and holly garnish, became the crowning glory of a British Christmas meal and a true marker of identity (one that continues to befuddle many visitors from afar).

The Empire Marketing Board encouraged housewives to make Christmas pudding using only colonial ingredients

That Christmas meal came of age in Britain in an era of empire, and the Cratchits’ dinner was soon exported. Britons brandished their puddings wherever they went: a sugary statement of imperial confidence. In the 1920s the Empire Marketing Board, which promoted trade within the empire, launched a campaign encouraging housewives who were making the sticky Christmas dessert to use only colonial ingredients: currants from Australia, candied peel from South Africa, rum from Jamaica, sugar from the West Indies, cloves from Zanzibar, cinnamon from India. As well as promoting imperial unity, the “Empire Pudding” campaign was also a riposte to upstart raisin exporters from California.

Christmas puddings and full roast dinners were dished up in all climates: for years Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans sweated through such meals even in their mid-summer heat. As a concession to the swelter of Christmas in the southern hemisphere, the meal might sometimes be enjoyed in the form of a picnic. The roast could even be eaten cold. But by golly there would be a pud. A missionary in east-central Africa in the late 19th century describes serving a pudding, burning “brandily and bluely”. In many countries the tradition continued long after the British flag had fallen.

As Britain’s influence began to wane in the 20th century, so did the reign of its festive fare. In Australia turkey and plum pudding were gradually superseded by dishes more fitting to the country’s summertime Christmas climate: seafood barbecues and pavlovas, piled high with seasonal tropical fruit. Australians who still hankered for the traditional trimmings could enjoy a new date in the calendar: “Christmas in July” (celebrated on the 25th, of course).

Even in the colonial era, America remained ambivalent about the British festive menu. When imperial Britain was pushing its puddings on the world, America was busy writing its own story in the wake of the revolutionary war. The Cratchits’ Christmas table did have some appeal: America’s founders saw themselves as “gentlemen” whose cultural habits were rooted in the British upper class, so they expected to eat some kind of roast meat on Christmas Day. But the new country’s elite wasn’t willing to entirely replicate the festive menu of their former oppressors.

A missionary in Africa at the end of the 19th century describes serving a pudding, burning “brandily and bluely”

Culinary choice became a symbol of independence. Today America’s Christmas traditions are more fluid than those in most countries, and people may eat anything from chicken to ham to turkey (for many years beef was too cheap to be considered sufficiently celebratory). Even without its association with imperial oppression, plum pudding would have been a hard sell in America. As Ben Davison, a historian at Loyola University New Orleans, points out, Britons steamed the dessert on their hearths but American kitchens tended to be built around ovens. Christmas Day literally had a different architecture.

Our eating habits have changed extraordinarily fast in recent decades, as globalisation, open markets and open minds have widened our choice and our diets. The stakes are pretty low when you decide to try out a new dish for breakfast, lunch or dinner – these are daily occurrences, after all. Christmas, however, comes but once a year, and altering the menu is risky. When you mess with Christmas dinner, you mess with your memories too.

The festival is fundamentally about nostalgia and memory, reckons Madeline Shanahan, a historian of food. The perfect Christmas of the past is always elusive. Even Elizabethan writers complained that Christmas failed to live up to its medieval heyday. To change something as central as the feast risks undermining your own sense of connection with the past.

This year, the stubborn refusal to vary a Christmas menu may have an upside. As the pandemic has drifted on, with every meal conjured from your own kitchen, the question of what to eat day after day has become ever more tiresome. In one sense at least, the Christmas lunch provides a welcome break. True, it is laborious. It demands planning and preparation. This year its excesses feel faintly ridiculous. But the question of what to eat requires no thought. And that, if nothing else, is a relief.■

ILLUSTRATIONS: ALBANE SIMON